I recently learned about a new card game called Go Extinct! that’s designed to teach evolutionary concepts about biology to kids and adults alike. Similar to the rules of the popular card game Go Fish, this new game has players collecting animals according to their supposed evolutionary relationships. The game even comes with a supposedly accurate evolutionary tree to facilitate teaching the concept of an evolutionary tree of life.

Oh, how diabolical! Hey — you can buy it on Amazon: Go Extinct! They have a picture of that “supposedly accurate evolutionary tree.” Stay with us, dear reader, because Hambo’s rant is just beginning. He says:

Games and books that teach evolution to kids are growing increasingly popular. …. Encouraging kids to become interested in the sciences early on is one way of combating this illiteracy. But, sadly [Hee hee!], instead of designing books and games that teach kids good observational science, many of the books and games teach unobserved historical science starting from an evolutionary foundation.

Gasp! Let’s read on:

This is really nothing but indoctrination in the religion of naturalism (atheism). Of course, these resources don’t teach kids the many problems with evolutionary ideas! They don’t encourage kids to question evolution but to blindly accept it. But evolution has huge problems, and kids need to be taught about these problems.

Huge problems? Oh yeah. Here they come:

Here are just a couple of quick examples of some of these huge problems that kids should be taught. Although technically, biological evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life, there is no known way that life can spontaneously come from non-life (this idea actually breaks the law of biogenesis) — and if you can’t even get life in the first place, how does evolution get started? One can’t discuss biological evolution if it’s impossible for life to form by natural processes!

Even if life somehow breaks the law of biogenesis [Hee hee!] and comes into being, nothing can happen because information only comes from other information — where does all the brand-new information needed to turn an amoeba into an astronaut come from? There’s no known mechanism that creates truly brand-new information!

We discuss that clunker in CCCC also. Here’s more from Hambo:

The more scientists study the fossil record — the supposed record of evolutionary history — the clearer it becomes that it doesn’t support an evolutionary timeline. Organisms are found fully formed, functioning, and highly complex from the very beginning.

Yeah, where are all the half-creatures? That one is also in CCCC, under the heading: “No transitional fossils.” Moving along:

But most young people will never be taught these problems or so many other problems. They are taught evolution in most of our public education system and through much of the media as if it has been proven — even though you can’t test, repeat, or observe the alleged past. But with all the problems mentioned above and many more, there is no issue if you start with God’s Word.

What those evolutionists are doing to kids is an outrage! The best place they can learn The Truth™ is through Hambo’s creationist ministry, Answers in Genesis (AIG), and by visiting his infamous, mind-boggling Creation Museum.

Then, Hambo’s rant reaches its thundering climax:

Life didn’t come from non-life — it was created by the Life-Giver, the Creator God of the Bible. Information doesn’t arrive spontaneously — it was created by the Information-Giver who designed organisms to reproduce according to their kinds, so we shouldn’t expect to see new information arising by itself. And the fossil record isn’t the record of life’s slow evolution. Most of it is the result of the global Flood of Noah’s day, so we should expect to see fully formed and complex animals from the very bottom of the record. The evidence confirms God’s Word, not evolutionary ideas about the past.

He concludes with a bunch of plugs for the stuff he sells at his bookstore, which is introduced like this:

At AiG we love science and want to encourage kids to explore God’s creation and learn more about what He has made. But we want kids to do it starting with the sure foundation of God’s Word, not the sinking sand of evolution. That’s why we feature science curricula, books, and other resources in our bookstore [blah, blah, blah].

So there you are. It’s no wonder Hambo is so upset. We sympathize with the guy.

Did anyone else notice the similarity between Ham’s “information” argument and the Discoveroids’? The Discoveroids, however, is in no way linked to creationism….coffKUHSCHEISSEcoff (The English word was blocked.)

It’s telling in the text that Kenny’s admitting that his standard creationist arguments are flawed. For example “Although technically, biological evolution doesn’t deal with the origin of life” can only mean that he realises that the Theory of Evolution doesn’t in fact preclude a god from initiating things.

Dear HamBone,
Gulf of Mexico exploration biostratigraphers have long since listed the numerous foraminferid extinctions that allow exploration geophysicists and geologists to correlate beds in the exceedingly structurally complex geology of the deep water Gulf of Mexico. In case you’re wondering, dim bulb, this is where a significant portion of the hydrocarbons used to refine gasoline that you burn EVERY day up there in Kentucky comes from.
THEREFORE, unless you intend to spend the remainder of your days riding a donkey, you would do well to chill out with regards to your incredibly ignorant anti extinction rants. Dim wit.

Ken opines “At AiG we love science…when it agrees with our preconceived notions. We are authoritarians and we have no use for the free-wheeling “follow the evidence where it take us” nature of science as has been practiced since the Enlightenment. We actually have no idea what science is or how scientists actually do science.”

Since Hambone proclaims early and often that he prefers bronze age myths rather than the facts of evolution, I wonder why he doesn’t rant about history. After all, historians have found that nearly all of the “historical” stories* in the bible are myths too, including, of course, his favorite flood story.

I’ve mentioned before Hambo has a two tiered approach to his flock.
The first tier is the believer tier to them any mention of evolution is considered heresy, other than that they don’t waste any effort thinking about it. (This blog post is for them). The second tier is the thinking tier. It is obvious that there has been evolution, and Hambo sees this as the “forest of evolution” (rather than the tree of evolution) so that the many “kinds” on the ark evolved at astonishing speed to fill every ecological niche as the flood retreated.
I can identify the tier Hambo is touting. You notice his rebuttal is completely anti-evolution, no mention of forest of evolution at all here. He actually prefers not to mention it, instead he saves it when confronted with an inquiring skeptical mind.

Will Ham have a creationist version of the game produced? Undoubtedly.

Even better would be a game involving strategy and skill, such as competing to see who can get on the ark before the flood comes (the losers die, of course), strategizing how to feed the animals and take care of the poop before they eat each other and turn the boat into a floating septic tank (in which case everyone dies), participating in fun action while trying to pilot the huge wooden ship with no engines or sails in the greatest storm in the history of the planet (really, an impossible task so someone has to draw a miracle card, else everyone dies), playing a detective game of trying to find Noah’s hidden wine stash, and many other “true history” ark games.

Or, for the less reverent, maybe a fun game of “name those women”, in which contestants invent humorous biblical-sounding names for the apparently unimportant thus unnamed women in Noah’s family. The mothers of all humankind after the flood, who’s names were forgotten by their descendants, and apparently by the eyewitness God who failed to relate anything about them to the scribes who told the story, although he remembered to gossip about Noah about being drunk and naked. (Even in that story his wife was nowhere to be found.) Maybe they were just edited out in later revisions of the story.

No. He can try to have a creationist card game produced, but he won’t succeed. Games have rules. Evolution has rules. Nature has rules. God doesn’t have rules.

I recall a ’70’s tabletop map sheet game called something like “Red Star Rising” that was an attempt to simulate a Soviet invasion of western Europe – an event that was for a while thought to be on the cards (as it were). It had an option for simulating the effect if the conflict went nuclear, which consisted of an instruction to take the mapsheet to the nearest grate, stove, or sufficient open space and set fire to it. There was no point to any other rules, the game designers said.

A creation card game would have to have a rule somewhat like that. It would read something like, “Whenever you want to, do anything you feel like”. It would be Calvinball without the net, the ball, the goals, the lines, flags, markers, scores – or Calvin or Hobbes, either.

Bert Younger ironically observes that it’s good to know that the Christian sharia movement is alive and well.

It’s alive, all right, but it is not particularly well, and it’s getting sicker. People are deserting, and the flight is especially marked among the young, as Ken has observed, groaning and gnashing away. Roe vs Wade is law, and so is Kitzmiller vs Dover School Board, and so is Edwards vs Aguillard, and so is the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. Kim Davis has had her fifteen minutes, and is back at work not signing marriage certificates, and nobody cares. Hovind is out of jail, but may be going back again, and nobody cares. Ken Ham was locked out of a home-schooling conference – a home schooling conference, yet! No mainstream Christian denomination wants a bar of him – not even his own original one. He’ll open his Ark Park, which will be in the news for a day, then slowly fall apart, while its actual investors lose their shirts. Not Ken himself, of course – he’s carefully insulated himself from loss. Except of face. It’s a pity, but losing his face won’t shut his mouth. But nobody will care.

They lose, and they keep on losing, and they know it. They’re not well, and they know it. Oh, sure, they’ll linger on, and they have to be watched, because they’re still capable of throwing up the occasional atrocity. But they’re going down, and they’re going to keep on going down.

@Dave Luckett
As far as the rules of the game, I want to mention that they are so anarchic as not to be bound by the plain words of the Bible. If need be, they make up supposed meanings of Biblical Hebrew. The important thing is that there be no authority which they can not control – such as reality.
And I also offer the opinion that they will not get a voice in the Supreme Court interested in supporting creationism. There are more important things that any ongoing appointments will be fought over.

I’ve spent about five seconds on the problem, and I’ve already got the beginnings of a game concept. It’s a board game, like Monopoly, called “Lake of Fire!” The players take turns, roll dice, and move the indicated number of squares around the board. The squares are life choices, like lust, pornography, fornication, etc. And of course, teaching evolution. Only a few squares are “good” ones, like bible study, prayer, abstinence, and so on. Landing on a good square lets you collect rapture points. I’m not sure what happens when the game is over, but the winner not only gets all the winnings, he also watches as the losers are tormented. Fun for the whole family!

roll dice
That’s a no no!
And remember, it makes no difference the number of merits or demerits one collects, it’s whether you are on the salvation square at the end of the game, that’s all.
When you mentioned abstinence, at first I thought that you were thinking like a Papist – but then I realized that your mind was focused on the one thing that must be the prime focus of all good Christians.

To answer the question, the game would have to be over when the player dies.

The game could have “You Die” cards randomly scattered throughout one of the card decks, and when a player draws a “you die” card, depending on the number of rapture points in their possession, they go to heaven or the lake of fire. The remaining players would continue to play until they all die. After all, dying is what religion is all about.

I think you’ve got a winner on your hands – better patent it quick, because you know Ham (or one of his minions) reads this blog.

I just wanted to say a quick “thank you” to you for the link to your extended discussion of the variety of nonsense arguments against science overall, and evolution specifically. While you and I probably do not agree politically, it is quite clear that no matter one’s political positions, there is an undeniable and urgent need for folks on both sides of the aisle to vigorously argue for the continued development of science education and against the creeping encroachment of creationism/ID “curriculum” in our public schools.

Articles like this are invaluable primers to assist in that process, so thank you again.

In a creationist worldview extinction really is the end. Nothing to take the place, to occupy a same ecological niche, once eg dinosaurs go extinct. (Except that we now have birds, more mammals, apes and Homo sapiens.)

And of course YECs cannot remotely explain the (unbiblical) extinction of every species of dinosaur on the planet. When you ask them to do so they BLOCK your emails.

Life didn’t come from non-life — it was created by the Life-Giver, the Creator God of the Bible. Information doesn’t arrive spontaneously — it was created by the Information-Giver who designed organisms to reproduce according to their kinds, so we shouldn’t expect to see new information arising by itself. And the fossil record isn’t the record of life’s slow evolution. Most of it is the result of the global Flood of Noah’s day, so we should expect to see fully formed and complex animals from the very bottom of the record. The evidence confirms God’s Word, not evolutionary ideas about the past.

Evidently the Hamster has bever heard of the
holographic principle—or doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t believe in it any more than he believes in evolution. What it boils down to, though, is that new information can “arise by itself”—at the expense of energy and an increase in entropy. And even though creating new information represents a local decrease in entropy, it’s swamped by the vastly greater increase in the entropy of the solar system represented by the sun’s progression towards an inert state it will reach billions of years from now.

If local decreases in entropy—and therefore increases in entropy—weren’t possible, not only would evolution be impossible but so would, say, the growth of a human being from a single cell. Of course, Ham might say that’s proof of a Designer—but any human engineer who designed a machine whose every single action, down to the turning of each gear or the action of each circuit, had to be directly brought about by its operator (the engineer himself, in the case of a living being in Ham’s belief system) wouldn’t keep his job very long. If there really is a Designer, He’s incompetent.

Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with the notion of a God who created the universe—but it makes a lot more sense to imagine that He set the initial conditions to let it develop as He intended and then let it do so, intervening only occasionally if at all, than that He has had to directly control every event down to the quantum level all along.

By the way, I’m glad to be able to make this post; for the past couple of days, this site was blocked as “possibly dangerous” by my computer and I had to fiddle around to get it unblocked (the first approaches I tried didn’t work). I was starting to worry that some creationist hacker had brought down the site, until I noticed I could still get in via my cell phone. So back to exploring my computer’s security settings, and presto, here I am again.

About those “fully developed and complex animals”—we only see them in the fossil record because they had hard parts which could fossilize, Anything that doesn’t can’t really fossilize, though it can be preserved if encased in something like amber. (But amber itself is a product of complex life, so wouldn’t have been around in the Cambrian and Precambrian.)

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